As part of staff enrichment, Stretch and Challenge co-ordinator Ms Rinck experienced a weekend of astronaut training at the European Space Centre in Belgium.

Suspended from a harness and wearing a pair of virtual reality goggles, Ms Rinck explored the surface of the moon. With every step, she bounced up in the air as if she was only one sixth of her Earth weight.

“I walked away from a space shuttle, seeing another astronaut bounding across the moon to my right. The breathtaking view of the tiny Earth hit me when I turned around.” – Ms Rinck

After the moon walk, Ms Rinck (along with six other teachers from around the UK) experienced a role play simulation of a NASA mission control centre – a facility that manages space flights from the point of launch until landing. Ms Rinck monitored weather conditions at the launch site, communicating to the rest of the team whether conditions were within a favourable range.

Other activities included constructing a rocket and firing it into the air, a torchlit tour of a medieval castle and learning about engineering problems faced by space launch programmers.

Among the most interesting facts of the day, Ms Rinck discovered that Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, had such a top secret job that he could not tell anyone about it. His wife found out that he was a cosmonaut through the television broadcast breaking the news that he was in space!